John Ruskin Quotes
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No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
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What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially, power over men ... this power ... is in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves.
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Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.
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You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
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Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.
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The true grotesque being the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind, there is a false grotesque opposed to it, which is the result of the full exertion of a frivolous one.
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We are, after all, only trustees of the wealth we possess. Without the community and its resources... there would be little wealth for anyone.
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It ought to be quite as natural and straightforward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from his country, because he has deserved well of his country.
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All the best things and treasures of this world are not to be produced by each generation for itself; but we are all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but each and all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering snow-ball, higher and higher, larger and larger, along the Alps of human power.
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Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
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The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.
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You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
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That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin.
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Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.
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When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.
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When men do not love their hearth, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ... Our God is a house – hold God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling.
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An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.
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The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.
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No one can ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.
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The repose necessary to all beauty is repose, not of inanition, nor of luxury, nor of irresolution, but the repose of magnificent energy and being; in action, the calmness of trust and determination; in rest, the consciousness of duty accomplished and of victory won; and this repose and this felicity can take place as well in the midst of trial and tempest, as beside the waters of comfort.
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All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.
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No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
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A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.
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Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.